


Don't look ahead, there's stormy weather

by SecondStarOnTheLeft



Series: There's Nothing Quite Like It [4]
Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin, Pacific Rim (2013)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Fusion, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-01-28
Updated: 2014-05-20
Packaged: 2018-01-10 10:03:36
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 7
Words: 2,570
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1158318
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SecondStarOnTheLeft/pseuds/SecondStarOnTheLeft
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The whole world went weird when the kaiju crawled out of the sea. Some people freaked, but most just dealt with it and carried on.</p><p>Continuing stories from a world where the monsters, for once, are not people.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Shireen Baratheon, MP

Shireen didn't much remember the time before the kaiju. She remembered Dad constantly fighting for funding to save the world, though.

Now it was her turn.

 

* * *

 

Nobody wanted to admit that they were losing, that was the problem. The government - situated safely on the east coast, well away from the Sunset Sea and the monsters destroying the west - didn't give a damn that there was only so many times they could nuke their own people before they'd be destroyed, and rightly so in Shireen's opinion.

She took Dad's seat in Parliament in the by-election a landslide victory over Aegon Targaryen, whose father was Dad's constituency partner and current PM, and she waited until she'd been accepted in and had fooled everyone into thinking she was as quiet and biddable as he'd been stubborn and argumental.

Dad had died while lobbying wealthy bastards on the west coast for money to save themselves, never mind everyone else, and she figured that had gone a long way to putting her in over Egg. Rhaegar Targaryen had stuck his head in the sand and done nothing that he hadn't been bullied into, but Dad, he'd fought and fought and fought some more.

When everyone thought Shireen was going to just fade into the background and accept her senior constituency partner and party leader's _crap,_  she stood up, Devan to one side and Asha Greyjoy to the other, and she  _fought._

 

* * *

 

The only thing stopping her from piloting herself was her stupid weak heart. If it hadn't been for that, she would have jumped at the chance to climb in a Jaegar (with Devan, because who else could there be?). Asha told her that there was nothing quite like it, and Shireen believed her - Asha wasn't prone to exaggeration, and she'd done more  _stuff_ than anyone else Shireen had ever met.

She kind of liked the idea of sharing so much with Devan. He already knew her inside out, so there wouldn't be any surprises, right?

But her heart  _was_ weak, always had been, so instead she fought and cajoled and bullied money out of people and into the pockets of the people who built the Jaegars and Shatterdomes, the people who were saving the world.

 

* * *

 

She won, mostly.

It was money Shireen and her allies had all but beaten out of the Cabinet that funded Bear Island being built. It was money that Shireen and her party - newly formed, not officially a party, kind of a subparty, really - managed to squirrel away from donations that bought the nuke that was supposed to close the Breach.

Maybe that was why Shireen took Rhaegar's position as party leader during the heave after Arya Stark was the only one to come back up from the Breach. Maybe that was why her and her brand-new, too-young cabinet were the ones voted into power in the first general election after the Breach was closed.

Shireen spent a couple of days back home on Dragonstone with Mum after she became PM. She'd gotten a sort of official letter of thanks from the Programme, signed by all the marshals and surviving pilots, and she slipped it under the jar holding Dad's ashes the morning she was due to leave.

"We did it, old man," she told him. "We did it."


	2. A matter of perspective

Hundreds - thousands, millions maybe - of people have seen her prance around in skimpy underwear with her boobs almost-but-not on show, and all she ever felt was a sort of quiet disdain.

She blushes when Quent looks at her in her undies.

It’s maybe because it means something when he looks at her - Quent’s not just seeing a pair of boobs and a pert ass.

Okay, he sees that, but he also sees things like her doctoral thesis that he read every word of even though he didn’t understand half of it, or all her volunteer work, or the fact that all the profits from those horrible  _fucking_ posters and lad mag shoots went towards saving the world by means of funding Quent’s research.

So Quent sees all that, but he also sees the boobs and the butt, but she doesn’t much mind when it when it’s him.


	3. Papa, paparazzi

_We are the crowd/we’re coming out_

They go on holidays to Starfall, which is cooler than Sunspear, so Arianne can soak up the heat without Arya dying of heatstroke. They’re good at compromises like that.

They didn’t even notice the paparazzi on the cliffs, but the next day pictures of Arya plastered over Arianne’s back as Ari carried her back to the hotel (no heatstroke doesn’t mean no sunstroke) are plastered all over every tabloid in the country.

Apparently, they assumed she was straight.

_Not sure what it means/ but this photo of us/ it don’t have a price_

Soon, they can’t walk out the door without being snapped. Or papped, or whatever the word is. 

Arya gripes about it at work all the time - what the hell does it matter that she has a girlfriend instead of a boyfriend? She helped save the freakin’  _world,_ and so did Arianne! A little perspective would be nice!

Will and Tyrion exchange knowing looks, and Tyrion tells her that she’s a megastar, and even if she did have a boyfriend, her love life would be worth thousands to the trashy magazine industry.

_Baby there’s no other superstar_

Arya loses her temper one night when they get home from a date. Arianne’s dress is sleeveless and backless, showing off her tattoos, and the  _abuse_ that was shouted at her, because they’re kaiju, every tattoo is a kaiju, but Arya couldn’t give a shit because she understands the significance of them.

Every kaiju a Martell killed is remembered on Arianne’s skin. Arya  _gets_ it, and nobody else seems to, and if Ari weren’t with her she wouldn’t have to put up with this  _shit._

"Yeah," Ari agrees easily, pouring two glasses of wine, "but then I wouldn’t be with you, and that’d be crap."

That kind of settles it, at least for now.

 


	4. Somewhere only we know

_And if you have a minute why don’t we go/Talk about it somewhere only we know?/This could be the end of everything/So why don’t we go/Somewhere only we know_

 

Sansa comes to see him after the funerals. He wasn’t able to go to the funerals, of course - his leg and all those burns wouldn’t allow for him to so much as leave his hospital room, never mind get all the way home to Highgarden to see them lower three empty coffins into the ground.

Leo stops visiting him after three days. He thinks it’s because he looks too much like Garlan, or because he came back and Garlan didn’t. 

Renly and Allyria both come to visit him every single day, but one day Sansa is there and they aren’t and suddenly,  _brilliantly,_ he wants to talk. He hasn’t wanted to talk in so long, but he wants to talk to Sansa, because she gets it, she  _knows,_ and he loves her, besides, has loved her from the moment he met her.

She hardly even seems to notice the burns or his leg or how weak he is. She just sits on the side of his bed and holds his hand and lets him cry because he can still feel them inside his head, Garlan and Loras and his Margie, and she curls up against him, minding the circuitry burns and curling her hand around his jaw.

She kisses him before she leaves, long and slow, catches his lip between her teeth and tugs as she pulls away. There’s a ring on a chain around her neck, a simple thing of plain gold, and he presses it to his lips before releasing her.

"Soon," she promises. "Soon, darling, I swear."

She ties another ribbon around his wrist, a ritual of theirs as much as the silly plastic cartoon character earrings he slips into her pocket, and in her next letter she tells him about her arrival in Lannisport.

She’s dead by the time he gets it.


	5. Funding

"I never would have considered you as  _daring,_ Quent,” Wylla said, tone painfully light as she circled his chair. “Arianne made a point of telling me that you were anything but, in fact.”

Quentyn swallowed around the lump in his throat, wishing he hadn’t mentioned a thing about it now. Better for them both that he hadn’t, really, but he  _needed_ to do this, especially after- after Uncle Obe and Aunty Elia.

"The university is never going to fund you for this," she said quietly, dropping to her knees in front of him and folding her arms on his thighs. "You know that, Quent. They laughed Arianne out of the room, what makes you think this will be any different?"

"I don’t want to  _Drift_ with a  _kaiju_ -“

"No, you want to study an interdimensional portal miles under the Sunset Sea, and you think you can predict how it will behave by observing its behaviour over a period of several months and plugging the data into an unproven algorithm. Be reasonable, honey, it makes  _sense_ that they’re going to refuse you.”

"So you think I’m mad too, then? Is that it?"

Wylla laughed, reached into the back pocket of her jeans, and pulled out a slip of paper.

"If I didn’t believe in you," she said, "would I be handing you the first of hopefully many paychecks from scarily lucrative underwear modelling to fund your research?"


	6. Reunions

Somehow, word has not spread throughout the ‘dome that Quentyn is married, much less that he is married to the woman whose picture adorns the inside of many a locker door.

Hence, it is with more than a little smugness that he stands and waits patiently as Wylla’s chopper comes into land - not hers, her family’s, but she’s the only one that really uses it. There are people around, there always are, but Quent just stands there and folds his arms and smiles, because his wife is nearly, nearly here, and it has been a  _very_ long time, and Skype calls only go so far.

She steps down, all high heels and absurd hair, and she smiles and he’s so far gone that he’s fairly sure he floats across to her.

She smiles wider, and there’s a crowd gathering because she’s kind of famous and kind of amazing and she did kind of finance a lot of things by giving all the proceeds of her modelling career to the K-Science department, which maybe helped save the world.

Quentyn can’t help but lift her up into his arms and kiss her senseless, because he’s  _missed_ her.

And because he’s just as prone to showing off as Arianne is, he’s just better at hiding it.


	7. Feckless

Renly is twenty-three years old when Stannis is elected MP for Dragonstone, and he doesn't fully understand what the hell the kaiju are or what they're doing.

Then he goes to visit Loras, and he sees. He knows.

 

* * *

 

 

Stannis thinks Renly is feckless, and he's probably right, Renly  _is_ feckless, and he  _does_ enjoy, well,  _joy_ too much to ever become a stuffy old politician like Stan the Man, but that doesn't mean Renly's uncaring. 

Stannis fights in parliament, fights for funding that way, but Renly goes the other way. He puts his profile as a Baratheon and his degree in journalism to good use, and he shames rich people into becoming less rich for the sake of the Jaegar Programme. Stannis' Selyse still calls him feckless, and Loras laughs at him, but Stannis looks at him with a weird sort of measuring look in his eyes that Davos assures him is respect, and Renly feels ten feet tall.

 

* * *

 

Renly's got a heart murmur - family failing, Dad had it too, and according to the doctors, Stannis' little girl has it as well. Sharing that makes Renly better inclined toward Shireen, because he was insanely jealous of her for taking Stannis away before, but now they've got something shitty in common so they're going to  _bond,_ whether she likes it or not.

Aside from making him pursue his duty as an uncle, the heart murmur keeps Renly out of a Jaegar, just like it'll keep Shireen out in a few years time. Stannis would never admit it, because it'd sound too much like cowardice, too much like a weakness, an expectation that everyone else risk themselves but  _not Stannis' family,_ but he's relieved, and Renly knows it. Shireen does too, she tells him over a game of Cluedo, she understands because her dad doesn't do death well, and climbing into a Jaegar is probably a death sentence, especially for someone with reflexes as slow as Renly's and coordination as bad as hers.

They bond over that, too, and when Stannis dies, they bond even harder.

 

* * *

 

 

Loras dying nearly kills him, and only the need to keep Willas alive keeps Renly going. Loras adored his parents, and Renly knows it would ruin them to lose  _all_ their kids, so he does this for them and knows it's really for Loras. He's the one that pays for Sansa Stark's train ticket, he's the one that gets Willas to the memorial service even though he doesn't  _technically_ have permission to get on a public train just yet, he's the one that shares that pain when Willas finally admits to the significance of the hair ribbons around the chains of tags and his wrist, and to the significance of the ring Arya Stark returns to him after he finally,  _finally_ starts talking again.

 

* * *

 

 

Renly accidentally ends up running for parliament after Shireen ousts Rhaegar and becomes party leader. He runs in the neighbouring constituency, Storm's End, and he's more surprised than anyone when he bloody well wins the seat.

Shireen makes him Minister for Communications, biting down on a smile, and her eyes have that same measuring look Stannis' used. Renly likes that, and by the end of their term in government he's been promoted to Foreign Affairs, and he's  _good_ at it.

 

* * *

 

 

Every family that lost someone to a kaiju rampage was offered a jar of ashes - didn't matter what kind of ashes, just a sort of place holder, really. Selyse took it and keeps it on the mantelpiece in her front room, and Renly knows that Shireen talks to it sometimes, but he's always preferred it here.

The graveyard at Storm's End - at  _home_ \- is on a windy arse of a promontory looking out over the sea, and the Baratheon plot is right up on the lip of the rise. Renly's never bothered much with Robert's grave except to make sure it's kept neat, but he's spent more time than he'd admit at the other two graves, the  _empty_ graves.

"Call me feckless  _now,_ you boring old bastard," he says as he lays a wreath on Stannis' grave, the day of the anniversary. "You'd be so fucking proud of her, Stan. So proud."

He has a smaller bunch of flowers for Mum and Dad's grave - a double plot, because how could they have separated them? - and he lays that too, and sits on the surround of Stannis' grave for an hour before he feels like leaving. He wonders if Stannis'd still respect him, or if he'd be despairing of Shireen letting him have the run of all their embassies in Essos.

Probably both, he decides, and then he goes.

**Author's Note:**

> Title from 'Disparate Youth' by Santigold


End file.
